50,000 trees and 100 crore saved by going paperless, says CBSE

Central Board Of Education claims to have saved 50,000 trees with its decision to go paperless . Not only that but with the 21 digital initiatives put in place for about six months, it has saved 100 crore as well.

According to TOI reports, The Board says the digital drive saved 50 lakh reams of paper as the need to print bulletins, admit cards, attendance sheets and other instructional material—about 30 crore pages-- was done away with. CBSE secretary Anurag Tripathi explained, “CBSE used to print around 20 pages per examinee annually. So this would amount to 300 million pages for 1.5 crore candidates. This reduces our carbon footprint.”

All this has been done as a part of larger set of reforms in the affiliation and examination system, TOI reports. Anita Karwal, CBSE Chairperson has stated that these digital initiatives are methods to make the system transparent, effective and free of error. “This also saves time, which is why we could announce the results earlier this time. Also it helped us decide not to conduct a retest of Class X Mathematics paper as we could analyse the impact (of the paper leak) within a couple of days”, she added.

TOI reports that some of these digital initiatives are completely new, such as, TETRA (Theory Evaluation Trend Analysis), which is a decision support system based on real time evaluation. Then there is OECMS (online Exam Centre Management System) to give out real-time information about exam centres, question papers, distribution timings, people with disabilities, people with health conditions, scribes, observers, etc.

The report also included, OASIS (Online Affiliated Schools’ Information System) which is an upgraded form of a previous system to detect inconsistent marking before the declaration of results and will now bring greater technological intervention to prevent paper leaks.